Exceptional Americans Manifest Their Destiny: [Jason Miller 17June'6]

6/17/06 -- Contrary to the “catapulted propaganda”, Enron, Haditha, and Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents or the work of a “few bad apples”. American savagery and oppressive behavior pervades our society and predates our nation’s birth. Building its patriarchal wealth on the backs of Black slaves and cheap labor while acquiring its territory through Native American genocide, predatory exploitation of non-Anglos, the poor, women, and the working class emerged as a pillar of America’s socioeconomic “success” before we even declared our independence.

With the advent of the Industrial Age, transcontinental railroads, and the rapid proliferation of Capitalism, an increasingly empowered young nation with an insatiable lust for more land, resources, and profits began to seek prey beyond its borders. At the close of the Nineteenth Century, the American Eagle spread its wings as it began mimicking the rapacious behavior of its Western European ancestors.

With the sun finally preparing to set on the British Empire, the days of conquest and expansion dawned for the nascent American Empire. Pathologically hubristic notions like Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism served to dehumanize indigenous people to justify invasion, theft and murder as acts of necessity to bring civilization to “primitives”.

In his latest book, Overthrow, former New York Times Bureau Chief Stephen Kinzer chronicles America’s exploits as an empire and imperialist nation.

What is it that they are spreading?

The Bush Regime’s launch of the Project for the New American Century with the invasion of Iraq was not really out of character for the United States. While it was certainly executed with more blatant disregard for international law than America’s previous imperial endeavors, it typifies the American sanctimonious belief that it can do no wrong.

George Bush was simply reiterating America’s long-standing mendacious rationale for its exploitative behavior when he stated:

“What I'm trying to suggest to you that this program is a part of a strategic goal, and that is to protect this country in the short-term and protect it in the long-term by spreading freedom.”

Consider some of the freedoms the United States is spreading:

1. Freedom to work under miserable conditions for a pittance.

2. Freedom to exist in an environment permeated with depleted uranium.

4. Freedom to experience a Kafkaesque nightmare including arrest with no charges, no trial to determine guilt or innocence, the endurance of torture, and indefinite detention.

5. Freedom to realize the inherent inferiority of one’s culture, religion, and language, and to cast them aside like sacks of rank-smelling garbage.

6. Freedom to be maimed or killed if one dares to reject the “gifts” of these freedoms.

America’s corporate media propaganda machine has managed to maintain a fastidiously manicured façade for many years. Despite appearing to exist as a champion of democracy, equality, freedom, and human rights, the reality of the United States was, and is, that its socioeconomic and governmental systems are racist, bigoted, ruthless and plutocratic in nature.

Democracy has never existed in the United States. A de facto aristocracy has dominated our constitutional republic dating back to the Continental Congress. Capitalism is a brutal, pitiless economic system that encourages and rewards greed, selfishness, exploitation, and annihilation of the competition.

Obsessed with materialism, conspicuous consumption, convenience, physical appearance, and winning, many Americans gorge themselves on the abundant fruits of Capitalism, oblivious to the fact that billions of human beings live in abject poverty and misery to make their feast possible.

America is a nation of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Its ruling elite class is buttressed by the poor and working people who have been rendered politically impotent by the allure of conspicuous consumption (which further enriches the elite), the illusion of democracy, and the extremely remote possibility that one of them could be the next Bill Gates.

Wearing its cloak of benevolence, America is an abstract embodiment of the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. Governed by avaricious profiteers produced and enabled by a ruthless system that brings out the worst in humanity, the United States is a predacious nation innocently posing as a bastion of human rights and democracy.